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The “we” in innovation – How we design *with* our clients

In my previous methodology post “The “Anti-Methodology” – A different approach to application design?” I talked about breaking down the barriers of role. This post is a continuation of that theme but we’ll be talking about the breaking down the barriers of the customer. 

Remember that excited feeling you had at the beginning of a project where the sky was the limit and you were chomping at the bit to get started conceiving your next, greatest masterpiece? It’s now three-months later and you’re biting your nails raw in anticipation of the 3pm presentation of your concepts to your customer. It’s been a great exploration, you’ve done your best work, researched the heck out of the topic, and yet you are still praying they will love your ideas. What’s wrong with this picture? You may not know it but this situation is exactly the situation you don’t want to be in. The problem I’m illustrating is the conceptual disconnect that is causing you to lose sleep hoping they won’t dissect your concepts or worse combine them (not to mention that you are showing more than one concept). It’s the fact that the people sitting in the boardroom don’t know what they are about to see. Put bluntly, if your client is going to be surprised by your concept presentation deep into the project, you are risking failure. Sadly traditional methodologies encourage this pattern and the potential disconnects that often arise. To us, it’s just gambling. 

How do we do it differently? We put our clients to work. A good friend of mine often refers to “Consultant’s Hubris” or the feeling that as a consultant we know more than the client. While we may be an expert at what we do, we hardly know the issues and opportunities the client faces on a daily (yearly) basis. We are not experts in their business, period. Face this and become more powerful. 

Our contracts require client participation, sometimes significant hours weekly. When we kick-off we ask our client to designate a “steward” who will participate in the project heavily. The steward must have deep experience within the client organization and products we are working with. They are a Subject Matter Expert (SME). 

We start with a working session to clearly define goals (or at least the first draft of the goals) and plan out how we are going to attack them. Following this are short 2-3 week work cycles (sprints) that involve twice-weekly working sessions where the client-steward and team are locked in a room discussing, researching, sketching and prototyping. Because our people are very experienced, they guide the steward’s ideas to merge with relevant trends and technology and result in beautiful solutions. At the end of each sprint we evaluate our collective success, present status to the larger client organization (gather additional feedback) and plan the next sprint. At the end of the project we have developed one concept with the steward that is not only extremely relevant but also co-owned. That’s right, the steward owns the solution because they co-developed it and they actually help ‘sell’ our collective solution to their organization as we develop it. Of course this means they are circulating pencil sketches and prototypes well before the final presentation, but they are also translating the thinking into meaningful dialog with their colleagues. It’s very powerful to watch. The best part is we together are all heroes at the end and if you can make your client a hero, you’ve done your job correctly. 

The first thing people ask me when I talk about this approach is how we handle the “bad” ideas stewards bring with them. The answer is communication. We’ve had stewards bring us wireframes of the application with full expectation that we would build exactly what they had specified. We embrace their concepts and talk directly about them with the steward. We explore the concepts that inspired them and the needs they are trying to solve. These concepts are immensely valuable windows into the mind our partner/client. During this conversation we share experience, industry trends, competitor approaches, and user-centric best practices. We do the drawing – together we are each the best at what we are. I’m proud to say that in every project we used this approach, the results have been stellar. The solution is something both we and the client are immensely proud of. 

Because this method is designed to break down the walls between the client and our team it works very well with companies who have stakeholders with competing needs. Our process works very well in this “federated” situation because we incorporate stewards from each department in our working sessions. The debates happen in real-time and if they can’t be solved on the spot, they are resolved within the week with follow-up discussions.

There isn’t enough room on our blog to talk through every detail of this approach but if you’d like to learn more about this process we’re happy to help. Drop us a line or post-back here and we’ll be glad to share. If you like we can present our approach, train your team, and even collaborate on your next big thing!

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Posted by Joseph Juhnke on June 24, 2010

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